For the past 12 months of my life, I paid the bargain price of $1,250 per month to sleep diagonally in a bunk bed in a 10ft x 10ft room that I shared with a 32-year old man. Because I am 6ft 4in, sleeping diagonally in my undersized accommodation was the only way I could make it through the night without getting cramps.

Welcome to my life in the hacker house.

In July last year, I left my home in the comfy suburbs of Washington DC to make the 3,000-mile drive west to San Francisco, with my mother along for the ride. I had just graduated from college that May, and as the cliched story goes, I was in pursuit of the tech dream. I didn’t have a lease, or a job. Because of the high rent in the Bay area, you usually can’t secure a lease without a job offer, and well, you can’t exactly say the jobs were coming easy. So I just went for it.